The Story Behind Tux the Penguin

Found this article on Wired.com about Tux the Penguin. Not really a long read, but one part from it caught my eye:

Still, variations of the story that “Linus was assaulted by a huge, rabid man-eating penguin that was running amok and was moving at more than a 100 miles per hour when it attacked him” are still happily told in the Linux community, but few take it seriously.

Seriously, what more can I say?

Browsershots

Nice tool to let you view screeenshots of websites in different browsers on different operating systems. A little slow at times but it’s still useful.

Browsershots

Nice new external HDD

As a late Christmas present (waiting for the sales) my mom got me a new external hard drive. 500 gig Seagate FreeAgent. Usually, HDDs fail right away or last for years, and it hasn’t failed yet, so barring the cat knocking it over or something (even though he knows he’s not allowed on my desk) it should be fine. And the five-year warranty isn’t too bad, either. (Either way, I’ll still be doing redundant backups.)

Pivot Stickfigure Animator

A lot of fun!

Pivot Stickfigure Animator

This is an animation I made.

I love making invisible posts.

It baffles people on many forums, who can’t figure out how I got around the character limits.
My preferred method is to use the font codes. For example, I use the [b] tags, and put a few spaces in between:

[b]        [/b]

On some newer forums, that doesn’t work, so I use my trusty 1×1 transparent image.

I doubt this is much help, either.

An actual error I got from my scanner program.

Oops!

Another free WYSIWYG editor

Called Amaya and made by the same people who set the web standards. Oh, and it has a browser included. Pretty nice, I say.

Because I like nice fancy installation wizards…

… I found this program useful for converting portable apps to installers. I don’t think developers of said apps would mind as long as I don’t start giving it out or selling it or whatever. Plus most of them are open-source anyways.

Some dull stuff on partitioning and some other dull stuff regarding my stupidity

OK, so I managed to break Linux … twice. In a day. The first time was trying to uninstall some fussy sound drivers. The second time I did something with the Terminal which I wasn’t supposed to do.

Then I accidentally deleted the partition while trying to fix it. Aren’t I bright?

Then I had to restore the Windows bootloader using the Windows Recovery Enviroment. It’s included on the Vista disk but if you don’t have it you can still grab it here.

For now, I’m sticking for a virtual machine. But now I know how to partition hard drives, I’ve been looking on creating a recovery partition with some basic apps on it (just ’cause it’s a pain to reinstall Vista when things go wrong.) And somebody told me to try SelfImage. Although I haven’t tried it yet, looks like a nifty tool.

Also, some other things I learned:

There’s a built-in partitioner in Vista. This is very useful. There’s also one on the Windows Vista disc, when you’re installing.

Another trick I learned: You can create a data partition to seperate your files from your system. If you’re really looking at seperation, you can get a second hard drive. An advantage of this is that if your Windows decides its had enough of you, you’ll (hopefully) not lose all your stuff. But make sure to do your backups, folks. If your hard drive bursts into a ball of flames, a second partition isn’t going to help much.